Hey, real talk for a second, do you fall asleep with your earbuds in?
No judgment. I do it too, honestly. There's something about putting on a podcast or a sleep playlist that just... makes the whole winding-down thing feel easier. Like your brain finally has permission to stop spinning.
But I came across something recently that kind of made me pause, and I figured I'd share it with you because I genuinely think it's worth knowing.
The New York Times just ran a piece on the safety of sleeping with earbuds in, and the short version is: it's probably not as harmless as we've been assuming. The longer version is a little more interesting though, so stick with me.
Here's the thing about your ears that nobody really tells you.
Those tiny hair cells deep in your inner ear, the ones that convert sound into signals your brain can read and they don't grow back. Once they're damaged, that's it. And wearing earbuds for six, seven, eight hours straight, even at a low volume, causes those cells to fatigue over time. Gradually. Quietly. You won't notice it happening, which is kind of the whole problem. You might start to notice a faint ringing after a while, or sounds that used to seem normal start feeling weirdly loud. That's not nothing. That's your ears telling you something.
And it's not just the hearing stuff. If you sleep on your side, you've probably woken up at some point with your ear just aching from the pressure of an earbud pressed into it all night. That's your ear canal putting up with something it was never really designed to put up with. Add to that the fact that earbuds sitting in your ear for hours can push earwax deeper in, trap moisture, and basically create the perfect little environment for bacteria to throw a party. Ear infections from this are more common than people realize.
Oh, and here's one I didn't think about until I read it, noise canceling earbuds at night mean you might not hear your smoke alarm. Or your kid. Or something outside that you actually need to know about.
So what do you actually do with this information?
I'm not going to tell you to just stop, cold turkey, because that feels unrealistic and also a little preachy and I'm not here for that. But I do think it's worth being a little more intentional about it. If you use a sleep timer so the audio cuts off after 30 or 45 minutes instead of running all night, that's already so much better. Keeping the volume genuinely low — like, lower than you think is necessary — matters a lot more than most people realize. And giving your ears actual breaks, like not having something in them every single night, is probably a good idea.
But here's where I want to shift gears for a second.
There's actually a bigger picture thing going on here that the earbuds conversation is kind of adjacent to. A lot of us reach for earbuds at bedtime because we're trying to decompress. We're trying to get our brain to stop. And that's a real need — I'm not dismissing it at all. But the reason it's so hard to wind down in the first place is often sitting right in our hands. The phone. The scrolling. The blue light pouring into our eyes at 11pm while our brain is trying to figure out if it's supposed to be awake or asleep.
Blue light genuinely suppresses melatonin. That's not wellness-influencer stuff, that's just biology. Your brain uses light as its main cue for when to release melatonin and start pulling you toward sleep, and blue light from screens basically tells it to hold off. So you're lying there, playlist going, wondering why you can't quite get there — and part of the answer is that your eyes have been absorbing screen light for the last hour and your brain is genuinely confused about what time it is.
This is actually why I want to mention Ocusleep.
Our Ocusleep sleep glasses are blue light blocking glasses designed specifically for that wind-down window before bed. You put them on two hours or so before you want to be asleep, keep doing whatever you're doing, and let your eyes stop absorbing the wavelengths that are working against you. Your melatonin production starts doing what it's supposed to do. You get sleepy more naturally, you fall asleep faster, and you actually stay in deeper sleep longer.
It's not a miracle thing. It's just removing an obstacle that you probably didn't realize was there. And when you pair that with being smarter about the earbud situatio, using a timer, keeping the volume down, maybe swapping to a little bedside speaker some nights, you're actually solving the problem instead of just managing it.
I think once you understand what blue light is actually doing to your sleep, the glasses start making a lot of sense.
The point isn't that your bedtime routine is wrong.
It's that sleep is one of those things where small changes compound in really noticeable ways, and most of us are carrying around a few habits we picked up without ever really deciding to. The earbud thing is one. The late-night screen light thing is another. Neither one is a catastrophe on its own. But they're worth knowing about, and now you do.
So maybe tonight, set a sleep timer. Pop the earbuds out before you're fully under. And if you've got a pair of our Ocusleep glasses, put them on an hour before you want to be asleep and just see how you feel in the morning.
I think you'll notice something.